Season 4 and Leveling

[Archimage 98]

Since every season you will need to level your character from scratch again, I was wondering what the quickest way to solo/group level are.

 

From my friend I hear that Level 1- 10 you quickly to a Act 1 Bounty on Hard, don't know what to do next.

[Storm 426]

I wouldn't claim to have the fastest method for leveling, but I cleared all of A1 bounties which took me from level 1 to about level 12 or so. Then I did rifts all the way to 70. I don't know if Wizard is extremely OP now, or I was just getting good drops, but I was able to do T1-T2 from level 20-70 and it only took me about 3-4 hours to hit 70.

[lipsinch 46]

Farm Cursed Acts from A1 and A4 and Halls of Agony 3 in A1 on hard. It's the quickest way to do solo. Or just ask someone to power level you, takes 2 rifts or so. =)

[Vlad 411]

Apparently, according to our Diablo 3 expert, the fastest way to level is to do Rifts, and to play in a party (a larger party is better than a small one). As for difficulty, the recommendation is to play on Hard, as this nets you the most exp for the least amount of effort (and thus, for fastest clearing). Alternatively, if very well geared, you can play on Mastery, but never on Expert since the difficult to experience ratio there is poor.

 

Another helpful suggestion is not to get stuck on killing single or few mobs, but rather to try to find large groups of mobs that you can AoE together.

[jaxsonbateman 0]

I'll preface that I'm no expert (just play solo, but while playing casually starting to push ~40 rifts on my wiz, while waiting to finish my darn Vyr set :-P), but I have my seasonal method that works, and that I'm pretty happy with.

1. Start on hard, and only bother to jump to master if you have way too much dps for hard. Expert IMO isn't worthwhile - only a 25% experience boost over hard.
2. Complete the campaign. I'm a completionist so that's part of the reason I do this. Important note: if you can, try and find someone that can jump you past the guaranteed-legend bosses (Leoric + end of act bosses). No reason not to get these as high as possible as a good legend may last you til 70.
2.5. Do the bosses at these levels if possible: Butcher, Belial and Azmodan at 59, Diablo at 60, Leoric at 65 and Malth at 70. Those are the highest levels you can get their guaranteed legendaries at. I'd drop it down to normal for the first three to try and prevent an unwelcome ding, but probably stick with master or higher for the other 3 (especially for Leoric and Malth who may give you some Imp gems). In any case, you'll get 6 legendaries guaranteed, and Leoric's Crown is certainly half decent at any point (even once you're super-geared the effect can still be good on the off-chance you need to farm some gold).
3. In previous seasons I used to use my friend's account to repeatedly run the Templar's quest on master or torment I (depending on how good the character was). Lots of exp and loot and pretty easy overall. This season I actually had a lot of success going after diabolic caches, specifically on bosses that were easy to get to thanks to a pre-defined map. More specifically, these were Leoric, Magdha/ZK/Belial, Azmodan and Rakanoth.

3.5. If you land on an hour where act 2 is the bonus act, you can actually just relog until you get ZK bounties and just do those. I mean, running to Magdha or Belial isn't exactly time consuming, but ZK is the easiest of the 3 bosses and has no trash.

That's how I do it, and unless something changes how I'm likely to do it each season (pretty sure I won't be pushing for any leaderboards with it, but I'm certainly happy with the speed it goes).

Of course, it's remarkably easy to get boosted these days: have a friend play on torment 6, and drop into their game. I often use my friend's second account to quickly blitz through bounties in all 5 acts and get materials for Kanai's, and I've levelled multiple toons to 70 on their account in the process (in particular, have the levelee teleport to each bounty zone so they get exp for kills).